]]>Peter Robbins first met fellow painter Budd Hopkins in 1976, five years prior to the publication of the latter’s seminal book, Missing Time. Their shared passion for painting, UFO studies and the abduction phenomenon helped forge a thirty-five-year-long friendship and work relationship during which Robbins would serve as Hopkins personal assistant and confidante and work with the distinguished ufologist on literally hundreds of incidences of UFO related abduction including that of his sister Helen. In this particularly personal presentation, Peter Robbins talks about those years with Budd with particular attention paid to Hopkins the ufologist, the artist, writer, humorist, foundation director, media presence, humanist, and ultimately the world’s best known UFO investigator.

]]>http://www.openminds.tv/peter-robbins-budd-hopkins-a-personal-appreciation/31997/feed0Spacing Out! Episode 3 – Peter Robbinshttp://www.openminds.tv/spacing-out-episode-3-peter-robbins/20120
http://www.openminds.tv/spacing-out-episode-3-peter-robbins/20120#commentsFri, 18 May 2012 20:36:17 +0000http://www.openminds.tv/?p=20120UFO researcher, author, and lecturer Peter Robbins tells us about the Rendlesham Forest incident, also known as Britain’s Roswell. Plus, he talks about his alien abduction research with the late Budd Hopkins. That, and the latest news, right now on Spacing Out!

UFO researcher, author, and lecturer Peter Robbins tells us about the Rendlesham Forest incident, also known as Britain’s Roswell. Plus, he talks about his alien abduction research with the late Budd Hopkins. That, and the latest news, right now on Spacing Out!

]]>http://www.openminds.tv/spacing-out-episode-3-peter-robbins/20120/feed0A tribute to UFO researchers and Forteans who died recentlyhttp://www.openminds.tv/ufo-forteans-recent-deaths-778/11905
http://www.openminds.tv/ufo-forteans-recent-deaths-778/11905#commentsWed, 07 Sep 2011 00:58:34 +0000http://www.openminds.tv/?p=119052011 has been so far a very cruel year when it comes to prominent ufologists and Forteans passing away.

]]>2011 has been so far a very cruel year when it comes to prominent ufologists and Forteans passing away. Budd Hopkins, the famous artist, author and expert on alien abductions, was just the last one in a long list. Open Minds published his obituary last week as well as a second piece by me that included the posting of an exclusivevideo interview with Hopkins done by Italian journalist and ufologist Maurizio Baiata. In this article I want to pay tribute to all the other researchers who passed away this year both here and abroad. Unfortunately for me, I knew personally every single one of them—some better than others—but their varied contributions to the field ought to be remembered.

Ion Hobana (1931-2011), dean of Rumanian Ufology

Ion Hobana in Bucharest. (image credit: Cristina Aldea)

Ion Hobana, the dean of Rumanian ufology, was a gentleman and a scholar. He passed away in Bucharest last February 22, but I didn’t learn of his death until I attended the World UFO Symposium in the Republic of San Marino in April, where he used to be a regular speaker and where he was eulogized by his friend Cristina Aldea. I met Hobana at a couple of symposiums in San Marino a few years ago and he was a very agreeable and competent researcher and author.

UFO's Form Behind The Iron Curtain book cover

Hobana was by far Rumania’s best known UFO researcher and writer and a well known cultural figure in his country where he served as General Secretary of the Writers Union for many years. He was best known in the West for his book, co-authored with the Belgian writer Julien Weverbergh, UFO’s From Behind The Iron Curtain, published originally in 1974 and translated to many foreign languages, including English. This book was a key contribution to the field because it was the first one to provide a comprehensive overview of ufology in the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia and of course Rumania. UFO data from all these countries was very scarce during the Cold War and so Habana’s book, which showed the similarity of the phenomenon despite the political and cultural differences, became an instant classic. In the 1990s he published other UFO books in Rumania, including Enigmas in the Sky From History and The Mystery of Roswell After Fifty Years. Hobana was also the president of the Association for the Study of Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena (Rumanian acronym ASFAN), a pioneering ufological organization in his country.

Hobana was far more than just a UFO writer. He was an internationally recognized expert in the history of science-fiction and the famous 19th century French novelist Jules Verne. His university thesis in 1958 was on the history of science-fiction and he was also the author of numerous books and papers on that subject. Hobana translated many sci-fi authors to Rumanian since he was a polyglot familiar with many languages. He received many awards for all his cultural activities, including the Grand Prize from the Polish Ministry of Culture & Arts in 1973 and the World SF Award in Brighton in 1984. He will be remembered fondly by all those who knew him not just as an outstanding researcher but a kind man with a deep culture.

Jorge Anfruns Dumont, a true pioneer of Chilean ufology, passed away July 1 in Santiago at the Thorax Hospital, following a long illness. The funeral service was held July 2 at the Air Force Chapel in a ceremony attended by many prominent Chilean ufologists. Anfruns will be remembered particularly for reviving the role of the ufologist in Chilean society in the late 1980s. There had been some researchers and groups in the 1960s, but by the 70s—a period of major political upheaval following the military coup in 1973—it had all died out. Sure, there were still UFO sightings and these were covered by the press on a routine basis but no one was conducting ufological research. There were also contactees and when there was an important UFO case in Chile or abroad, the media didn’t have anybody to turn to except these contactees. This is the point where Jorge Anfruns entered the scene: he was a publicist, the son of a journalist of El Mercurio, Chile’s most prestigious newspaper, and so he understood well the culture of the media. He quickly became Chile’s first known ufologist, someone who could comment on the subject neither as a skeptic nor from a mystical perspective.

Ovnis Extraterrestres book cover

I knew Jorge Anfruns very well since we worked together in Santiago in the period of 1985 to 1990. I was visiting Chile then often, where I would stay at my parent’s apartment in Santiago for a couple of months, and I was looking for someone who could sponsor my UFO lecture and slide show. Anfruns offered to do it and, with his knowledge of the field and his extensive media connections, the lectures in Santiago were a big success both in public attendance and media coverage. I appointed him MUFON’s Foreign Representative in Chile and he later launched his own franchise, Mufon-Chile, which compiled the “First Catalog of UFO Sightings” in the country. Anfruns was the author of four books, of which the first one published in 1992, OVNIS Extraterrestres y Otros en Chile (UFOs Extraterrestrials and Others in Chile), was the most important one since it was the first UFO book published in Chile in decades, providing an overview of UFO cases in the country. Anfruns also produced a Spanish version of the documentary film UFOs Are Real, showing it throughout Chile and even at army bases. It was in the course of these travels, later expanded to Argentina, that he collected many unpublished UFO cases. He also organized the first UFO Symposium in Chile at the Carrera-Hilton Hotel in downtown Santiago in 1987.

In early 1998, Anfruns was the first Chilean ufologist to correspond with then Minister of Defense, Raul Troncoso, about the creation of the Committee for the Study of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena (CEFAA), confirming this agency had been formed with “the goal of collecting, studying, analyzing and classifying information related to strange phenomena… with the purpose of determining if the security of aerial operations in the country are in risk,” as well as “to begin forming a data base with information in the public domain.” Jorge Anfruns will be remembered for his many contributions to Chilean ufology, but probably his main legacy was to establish the role of the civilian ufologist in Chilean society.

William Corliss (1926-2011), great scientific Fortean

William Corliss lecturing at FortFest in the early 90s. (image Credit: Antonio Huneeus)

William Roger Corliss, a physicist and prolific author on scientific anomalies, passed away in Maryland on July 8. He was born in 1926 in Stanford, Connecticut, serving in the Navy during World War II and, later as a physicist, was Director of Advanced Programs in the Nuclear Division at Martins in the 1960s. According to the obituary published in the Baltimore Sun, “he became a prolific writer, authoring 57 books on atomic energy, space propulsion, scientific satellites, teleoperations, wind tunnels, and scientific anomalies in all fields of science.” It was this last category, carried on independently through The Sourcebook Project in Glen Arm, Maryland, that made him a very important Fortean.

The website of The Sourcebook Project describes the “Catalog of Anomalies” in the following way: “The Sourcebooks, Handbooks and Catalogs are compiled from 40,000 articles from the scientific literature, the results of a 25-year search through more than 12,000 volumes of scientific journals, including the complete files of Nature, Science, Icarus, Weather, etc. The Sourcebook Project is compiling an objective, unsensationalized catalog of anomalous phenomena.” Corliss was undoubtedly influenced and inspired by the writings of Charles Fort (1874-1932), the great compiler of all kinds of strange occurrences (including early reports of UFOs) now referred as Fortean phenomena. But while Fort pursued this with a unique literary flavor and philosophical approach, Corliss was a methodical scientist bent on classifying all the different types of anomalies.

His books and reports are thus divided in different categories: Biological Anomalies, Ancient Structures and Archaeological Anomalies, Geophysical Anomalies (Earthquakes, Unidentified Sounds, Rare Halos, Nocturnal Lights, etc.), Geological Anomalies, Astronomical Anomalies, etc. They are a fantastic yet sober resource of raw data for anybody wishing to pursue Fortean research. Arthur C. Clarke put it best when he described Corliss as “Fort’s latter-day – and much more scientific – successor,” adding that “unlike Fort, Corliss selected his material almost exclusively from scientific journals like Nature and Science, not newspapers, so it has already been subjected to a filtering process which would have removed most hoaxes and reports from obvious cranks. Nevertheless, there is much that is quite baffling in some of these reports from highly reputable sources.”

I remember meeting William Corliss a couple of times at the FortFest in the Washington, DC area (nowadays held in Baltimore), where he was a frequent speaker. Despite his impressive amount of knowledge and data, he was an unassuming man who didn’t promote himself or made exaggerated claims. He will be greatly missed by all serious researchers.

Hilary Evans (1929-2011), important English scholar and author

Hilary and Mary Evans (image credit: Clas Svahns)

Hilary Evans, a well known English researcher and author of many UFO and paranormal books, died July 27 at a London community hospital, where he was being treated for several complications. Together with his wife Mary, who passed away last year, Hilary founded in 1964 the Mary Evans Picture Library (MEPL), a huge data bank of old images from the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries (including many on the history of the paranormal and UFOs) which are used in many books and documentaries. This allowed the Evans to pursue their love of books and conduct their own research. Hilary’s personal huge UFO library was donated to the Archives of UFO Research in Sweden. There were also obituaries published in two major British newspapers, the Guardian and The Telegraph.

Visions, Apparitions, Alien Visitors book cover

Hilary Evans was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire in 1929, the son of a vicar who moved to India when he was a small child. He studied English in King’s College, Cambridge, followed by a Master’s at Birmingham, and worked in the advertising industry as a copywriter in the 1950s. His interest in the paranormal goes back to the 1960s, when he joined the Society for Psychical Research, the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA) and the Folklore Society, co-founding in 1981 the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena. Using the extensive MEPL image bank, Evans published two beautiful illustrated UFO history books, UFOs – The Greatest Mystery in 1979, and From Other Worlds – Aliens, Abduction and UFOs in 1998. Also important are his two comprehensive studies, Visions * Apparitions * Alien Visitors – A Comparative Study of the Entity Enigma (1984) and Gods * Spirits * Cosmic Guardians – Encounters with Non-Human Beings (1987), which are not picture books (although they include a picture section) but historical and philosophical studies of the different types of encounters with entities, compiled from a wide variety of sources including religion, folklore, history, the paranormal and ufology.

According to the Guardian, “his later books included Outbreak! (2009), which examined cases of mass hysteria, and Sliders (2010), which covered street-light interference, the belief by some people that they turn off street lights as they pass by them.” I met Hilary Evans in 1987 at the MUFON International UFO Symposium at the American University in Washington, DC, where he was representing England and I Chile, and saw him again at a couple of other conferences (I also dealt with MEPL a few times obtaining pictures for my UFO Calendar and other projects). I didn’t know him well, but what I remember was that he was a soft-spoken, true scholar. He was probably skeptic by American standards, but his type of skepticism was very European, not antagonistic or debunking, but very intellectual, looking for the big picture, trying to integrate psychological and sociological trends with the paranormal, not to “explain” it but to better understand these types of phenomena. “Typically,” wrote The Telegraph, “his approach was neither that of the passionate conspiracist nor the ruthless debunker. Rather, he adopted an open-minded, scholarly tone.” He is survived by his daughter Valentine and other family members.

Bob Girard, bookseller extraordinaire

Bob Girard at his office in upstate New York in 1987. (image credit: Clas Svahns)

Bookseller Bob Girard passed away August 12 in Port Saint Lucie, Florida. Long before there was Amazon, Abe Books, Ebay and all the other online outlets, his Arcturus Book Service, created in Scotia, upstate New York, in 1980 provided an invaluable service for anybody researching ufology, Forteana and the paranormal. There are a few books in these fields published by major houses, but a lot of material is self-published or put out by very small publishers, which you won’t find in bookstores. Nowadays you can find just about anything online, but that was not the case in the pre or early internet days. That’s why Bob Girard’s Arcturus developed such a loyal clientele all over the world. He moved his business first to Georgia and eventually to Port Saint Lucie, Florida.

Arcturus Books Catalogue

Bob was far more than just a bookseller. He was deeply knowledgeable of ufology and Forteana and wrote caustic reviews of most of the books he sold in his monthly or bimonthly Arcturus Books Catalogue, which he used to mail to his clients. His reviews were widely read because of their unique, no-hold-barred style. You knew Bob was an honest person in that he gave bad—sometimes awful—reviews to half the book he sold. He cared more for the integrity of the field than the almighty buck. To give you a couple of examples, here is what Girard had to say about Billy Meier’s Talmud of Jmmanuel: “…an embarrassment, in which Billy Meier’s recording of a mysterious Aramaic scripture – complete with Christ as a Pleiadian – is fanatically forced to fit a former fundamentalist’s deep need to reconcile UFOs and Christ.” That was comparatively soft to what he had to say about other books. There were some books he approved of course, always encapsulating his opinions and conclusions in his own unique style. Here is what he had to say, for instance, about Kay Wilson’s The Alien Jigsaw:

All right, all you wannabes who simply long to be taken onto a spaceship so that you can get to know all you can about extraterrestrials and their worlds, read this book before you go. You might find out in this book-the most clearly and bluntly-worded description we have yet seen of what it’s really like on that examination table-that, A) it hurts a lot, B) it can be pretty gross, C) you have utterly no control of the situation, D) you’re being used at will-their will, E) you can’t trust yourself once you’ve been abducted and you can’t trust ‘reality’ any longer, and F) no human knows enough about what’s happening here to be of any help to you if you have trouble coping with the totality of your predicament.

Bob Girard had a rough side to his personality and could be often rude with his own clients but his wife Monica Williams, a researcher from Guayaquil, Ecuador, was exactly the opposite, she was always nice and polite, and so they made a good team. Besides, once you got accustomed to Bob’s gruffy side, you got to like him just the way he was. I met him many times, he used to have a big table full of books at the MUFON Symposium, the X-Conference and a few other events, where he would usually complaint he wasn’t selling enough to cover his expenses. He was always threatening to get rid of Arcturus for years, but he kept going up to the very end. You can find a couple of additional perspectives on this unusual man in Loren Coleman’s CryptoMundo.

All the individuals profiled, Ion Hobana, Jorge Anfruns, William Corliss, Hilary Evans and Bob Girard, made their own, unique contribution to the ufological and/or Fortean fields, and they all should be remembered for what they did and for their true dedication and love of these subjects. Now that they are on the other side they may learn things they missed in this world.

]]>http://www.openminds.tv/ufo-forteans-recent-deaths-778/11905/feed0VIDEO: Exclusive interview with Budd Hopkinshttp://www.openminds.tv/exclusive-interview-with-budd-hopkins-76/11699
http://www.openminds.tv/exclusive-interview-with-budd-hopkins-76/11699#commentsThu, 25 Aug 2011 22:19:03 +0000http://www.openminds.tv/?p=11699Below you can watch an exclusive interview with Budd Hopkins from Open Minds done by our former colleague Maurizio Baiata... recorded during the 1997 World UFO Symposium in the Republic of San Marino.

A clip from the interview with Budd Hopkins. (image credit: Open Minds/Maurizio Baiata)

The death of prominent New York artist and alien abduction researcher and author Budd Hopkins last Sunday August 21 has been felt deeply throughout the international UFO community. Budd traveled widely around the world, giving lectures at symposiums all over the globe and his books were translated and published in many countries. Below you can watch an exclusive interview with Budd Hopkins from Open Minds done by our former colleague Maurizio Baiata, the well known Italian journalist and editor of several UFO magazines in Italy, which was recorded during the 1997 World UFO Symposium in the Republic of San Marino. The Ministry of Tourism of this tiny and picturesque independent city-state located in central Italy has been officially sponsoring UFO conferences for nearly 20 years, and I remember seeing Budd there again around 1999 or 2000. This exclusive Hopkins-Baiata interview was never broadcast in English and is posted here in full for the first time.

Open Minds posted Monday the obituary of Budd Hopkins containing the basic biographical details of his two parallel careers as an ufologist and author specialized in alien abductions, and as a well known abstract painter and sculptor. Although Budd kept these two endeavors separated from each other, they did come together in his last book, Art, Life and UFOs: A memoir by Budd Hopkins, published in 2010. The New York Times published yesterday a good obituary of Budd, where they mention that his interest in UFOs was sparked by his own sighting of a silvery disc in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1964. Budd owned a house in Truro in the Cape where he used to spent the summers devoted to his artistic creations.

Stonehenge apartment building. (image credit: Antonio Huneeus)

Budd’s mentor in the UFO field was Ted Bloecher, a seasoned investigator from New York and musician who had worked in one of the first UFO groups, Civilian Saucer Intelligence or CSI. Bloecher published in 1967 the classic Report on the UFO Wave of 1947, with an Introduction by Dr. James McDonald. Bloecher realized that in order to get to the bottom of the UFO phenomenon, one had to go beyond the documentation of just sightings and deal with the then thorny and controversial issue of the UFO occupants and their agenda. Budd’s first significant case was the investigation, with Bloecher, of a UFO landing and humanoid case in 1975 in North Hudson Park, New Jersey, in front of the Stonehenge apartment building, on the Hudson River across Manhattan. His report of this investigation, which included aliens coming out of the craft and scooping soil samples, was published in New York’s Village Voice, launching Budd’s public ufological career. Budd had a real talent of presenting his data to the media, which increased after the publication in 1981 of his first important book, Missing Time, and continued throughout the rest of his life.

I knew Budd for many years, meeting him for the first time around 1979 or 1980 when the French researcher Thierry Pinvidic visited New York and I accompanied him in his rounds of meeting all the prominent NY ufologists. I later remember an occasion when Budd needed a hypnotist—in his early years he didn’t do regressive hypnosis himself but used professionals like Dr. Aphrodite Clamar and others—because he had an abductee coming from out of town and Dr. Clamar was unavailable. He called my friend Pete Mazzola from the Scientific Bureau of Investigation (SBI), an ufologist and police detective who did hypnosis for the NYPD. I accompanied Pete to Budd’s studio in lower Manhattan, where the session took place. In the mid and late eighties I was a regular attendee of Budd’s abductee support group, a concept which he pioneered and which has been replicated around the country. Budd of course was not a licensed therapist, so his meetings were part-social and part discussion of the experiences and feelings by the abductees. Unlike other similar groups that started later elsewhere, Budd always invited researchers like myself and often writers and journalists who were working on stories on the subject. They were a fascinating blend of people of different backgrounds and philosophies and always highly interesting and provocative.

Budd was not really the first one to investigate or publish abduction cases—the Lorenzens and others associated with the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, APRO, had been doing this for a number of years, and high profile cases like those of Betty and Barney Hill, Charlie Hickson, and Travis Walton had all received considerable media attention. But until Budd came into the field, abductions were considered extremely rare experiences and no one was searching for wider patterns. Budd devoted a tremendous amount of time, energy and resources to look precisely for these patterns, which he later pursued through his Intruders Foundations created in 1989. He also became the chief spokesman for the reality of alien abductions, bringing the message that these experiences were real and important through his books, articles, numerous lectures and media appearances. He was also the mentor of Dr. John Mack, the prominent Harvard University psychiatrist and Pulitzer Price winner, who brought this subject closer to the mainstream. Not everybody agreed of course with Budd’s conclusions or his methodology and he had many critics, but his contribution to the field is absolutely beyond dispute. He did more than probably anybody else to bring the complex issue of alien abductions into the forefront and he will be missed by all those interested in that subject.

It has been known amongst his friends that alien abduction pioneer, Budd Hopkins, has been of ill health. Unfortunately, we recently received a note that Budd passed away Sunday. Here is the message from Leslie Kean:

Budd Hopkins

June 15, 1931 – August 21, 2011

I’m very sad to announce that Budd Hopkins died today, August 21, at 1:35 pm. Budd had been under hospice care for about three weeks, at his home in New York. The combination of liver cancer and pneumonia led to his death. His daughter Grace Hopkins-Lisle and I were with him almost continuously during these past weeks. He was not in any pain throughout any of the process, and he received the best possible care and loving support from those closest to him. Today he gradually slipped away, and simply quietly stopped breathing. He died peacefully and without any struggle, with Grace, Grace’s husband Andrew, and me by his side.

Thanks to all of you for being such strong supporters of this extraordinary man, who has contributed so much to our lives, in so many different ways.

– Leslie Kean

Open Minds’ Antonio Huneeus has retrieved a number of great original photographs from his archives of Budd throughout his career. We post them here in memory of a colleague and friend.

Budd Hopkins in his living room in 1991. (image credit: Antonio Huneeus)

Here are a couple of biographies on Budd, this first one is from the Intruders Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded by Budd to help those experiencing alien abduction and to educate the public on the phenomenon.

Intruders Bio:

Budd Hopkins is a world-renowned artist, author, and pioneer UFO abduction researcher. Having investigated well over 700 cases, he now heads the Intruders Foundation, a nonprofit, scientific research and support organization. Budd first became interested in the UFO phenomenon when he and two others had a daylight UFO sighting near Truro, Massachusetts, in 1964. In 1975 he carried out his first major investigation which involved a UFO landing and occupant incident in North Hudson Park, NJ. Shortly thereafter, he began to concentrate on the investigation of the UFO abduction phenomenon, which led to the eventual publication of his findings. Taken together, his three books, Missing Time, 1981, Intruders, 1987, and Witnessed, 1996, are widely regarded by researchers and skeptics alike as comprising the most influential series of books yet published on the abduction phenomenon. These works, Hopkins’ lectures, and his other presentations have been responsible for bringing a number of other noted researchers-David Jacobs, John Carpenter, Yvonne Smith, and John Mack, among others-into this extraordinary area of specialization. His documented discoveries have become the basis of most later abduction investigations and research.

Budd Hopkins (left) in an abductee panel at a conference in NY in 1988. (image credit: Antonio Huneeus)

Budd Hopkins has long been considered ufology’s most visible figure. He pioneered and continues to lead the investigation into the most controversial aspect of the UFO phenomenon-the systematic abduction of human beings by UFO occupants. As the world’s premier expert on this issue, he has worked with more than one thousand people who have reported abduction experiences over the past twenty years. These individuals come from all walks of life and include physicians, psychiatrists, attorneys, police officers, military personnel, political figures, personalities from the entertainment world, and even a NASA scientist.

A prolific writer and internationally respected painter, Hopkins has delivered hundreds of UFO lectures around this country and around the world. His groundbreaking first book, Missing Time, was the first work to compare a number of UFO abduction cases in order to isolate the patterns they revealed. His second book, Intruders-The Incredible Visitation at Copley Woods, was a New York Times bestseller and the basis for the popular 1992 CBS miniseries, Intruders, which has since been broadcast internationally. His widely acclaimed latest book is Witnessed-The True Story of the Brooklyn Bridge UFO Abductions.

Hopkins’ goal has always been to bring an objective, dispassionate scientific intelligence to bear on the UFO abduction phenomenon. To this end, he founded the Intruders Foundation (IF) in 1989. IF is a nonprofit organization devoted to research and public education concerning this extraordinary enigma. They publish a respected journal, as well as offer a nationwide referral service for those wishing to explore their own suspected abduction experiences.

Press conference in NY for the release of the Sy-Fy channel/Steven Spielberg series, Taken. From right: John Mack, David Jacobs and Budd Hopkins. (image credit: Antonio Huneeus)

Despite its extremely controversial nature, Hopkins’ research has received serious commentary in such mainstream publications as Time, Paris Match, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Omni, People, and Cosmopolitan. He has been a guest on hundreds of television and radio programs including Nightline, Good Morning America, The Today Show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Tonight Show, Charlie Rose, Larry King Live, The Charles Grodin Show, Sally Jesse Raphael, The Geraldo Rivera Show, 20/20, 48 Hours, Unsolved Mysteries, Encounters, A Current Affair, Nightwatch, The Late Show, The Art Bell Show, Tom Snyder, The Laura Lee Show, Hieronimus & Company, Weekend Edition (National Public Radio), Voice of America, Armed Forces Radio, numerous BBC affiliates, and many other shows and forums.

Budd Hopkins was born in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1931. He graduated from Linsly Military Institute (now Linsly School) in 1949 and Oberlin College in 1953. He first displayed artistic abilities when, as a child recovering from a long-term illness, he began to create sculptures of ships made out of modeling clay. But it wasn’t until he arrived at Oberlin that Budd Hopkins made a serious study of art.

He settled in New York after obtaining his degree and has had a residence there ever since. Budd Hopkins and his wife, April Kingsley, and their daughter, Grace, divided their time between their homes in Cape Cod, MA and New York City.

In 1963, Budd Hopkins was selected by the Columbia Broadcasting System as one of the 15 painters featured in the network’s first television special on American art. In 1958, Art News picked Budd Hopkins as one of 12 Americans for exhibition in the “Festival of Two Worlds” in Spoleto, Italy.

The artist’s brilliance has won him a number of fellowships and awards. In 1972, Budd Hopkins was awarded the Commission Prize by the West Virginia Arts and Humanities Council. In 1976, he received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for Painting and in 1979 he received a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. In 1982, Budd Hopkins won a special project grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. Also, in 1992 this native son of Wheeling, West Virginia was inducted into the Wheeling Hall of Fame.

According to Budd Hopkins, “My paintings and sculptures, at first glance, may appear to be purely aesthetic; closer up, they are not. They hold a feeling of tentativeness, combined with a sense of arrival.”

During his career, the artist has won wide acclaim in the field of abstract art. Budd Hopkins has established an international reputation as an artist and sculptor. His work is on display in many of the most prestigious art galleries and museums, not only in the United States, but in Europe as well. Budd Hopkins artwork has been exhibited in England, Finland, Italy and Switzerland.

The artist’s work has appeared in many exhibitions across the country and he is represented in many important private and corporate collections around the nation. Budd Hopkins paintings and sculpture have been featured in the Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery, Guggenheim Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Queens Museum, Public Library of New York and Whitney Museum.

Across the United States, Budd Hopkins’ art has been seen in the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC; the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum, among others. In addition, Universities and Colleges which have shown Budd Hopkins paintings and sculpture include his alma mater Oberlin, Princeton, Yale, Denison, Drew, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), DePauw, Williams, Brandeis, Middlebury, North Carolina, Michigan State, Reed, Bradford, Connecticut, Alabama, Bennington and the City College of New York.

Recently, Budd Hopkins has been recognized for his research into the matter of UFO’s and one of his books, “The Intruders”, printed by Random House, was on the New York Times best-seller list and was the basis for a television show on CBS.